The July/August 2001 Lawrence Summers Memorial Award* goes to Andrew Natsios, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID).

Africans “don’t know what Western time is. You have to take these [AIDS] drugs a certain number of hours each day, or they don’t work.

Many people in Africa have never seen a clock or a watch their entire lives. And if you say, one o’clock in the afternoon, they do not know what you are talking about. They know morning, they know noon, they know evening, they know the darkness at night.”

That was Natsios speaking to the Boston Globe. He voiced similar comments in June in testimony before Congress.
Natsios said be planned to “just keep talking about prevention. That is the strategy we’re using — even though I’ll be beaten up and get bruises all over me from the fights on the subject.”

Natsios’s views are not only racist, they are deadly. They falsely suppose not only that Africans cannot maintain treatment regimes, but also that HIV/AIDS treatment regimes are more complicated than they are. If treatment is denied to the 25 million people with HIV/AIDS in Africa, for Natsios’s reasons or any other, they will all die from treatable illnesses.

A distant runner up for the July/August award is Dr. Lant Pritchett, a former economist at the World Bank who teaches development economics at Harvard. “AIDS is a catastrophe,” Pritchett told the New York Times. “And it’s not fair, if treatments exist, not to give them to all these people who are dying. But it’s also not fair that more than a third of children in Africa are malnourished. It’s not fair that maybe 140 babies in every 1,000 will die before the age of 1, and more than a third will never learn to read. All of it is unfair. Unfairness is not the test for action.”

Sources: John Donnelly, “Prevention urged in AIDS Fight; Natsios Says Fund Should Spend Less on HIV Treatment,” Boston Globe, June 7, 2001; Stephanie Flanders, “In the Shadow of AIDS, a World of Other Problems,” New York Times, June 24, 2001.